I say that it is fine to judge groups of individuals if those individuals chose to join those groups. After all, it's what they want. They want to be grouped together with others of the group! Otherwise, why'd they join the group?!?
Exactly. People who join groups or tribes that require conformity and obedience don't want to be individuals anymore. They still are, but they choose to surpress their individuality in favour of either conforming or getting others to conform to be like them.
In either case, it is no longer valid to speaking of being sterotypical when referring to the people in these groups as by definition, everyone in the group must conform to the sterotype. You don't have to paint all these people with the same brush. They did that themselves.
11 people are going to be pissed as shit. 34 people are going to panic. 72 people are going to wonder if the story is relevant to them. 284 people aren't going to realise the story is relevant to them.
799599 people affected aren't even going to hear about this, let alone care.
There is a silent majority. It's silent because its too apathetic to speak.
Marketroids are duplicitous, unscuplulous, charlatans. In a related story, if you thought the campaign wasn't funded by Sony, you are a burden on your society and should be terminated for the good of all. News at 11.
An obvious troll,(modded up why...?) but I'll bite. Let's look at the GPs statement again.
That logic is flawed.
Same logic: Per capita, more black people commit crimes than white people, therefore, black people are more dangerous to hire.
Where's the flaw part?
This is an obvious fallacy based on what I like to call "The Tyranny of the Random Mean". Like most statistics, the GPs statement is valid, when based on a certain "population". In this case, the entire population of black people, in I presume the USA. And certainly it would be true that, on average, on average, if you selected at random100 black people from the entire black population in the US, and the same for 100 white people, then the total sum of criminal convictions would probably be higher for the former group. Please note the italised and emboldened words in the above. They are very, very important.
Now, you're conducting a job interview, where the interviewees' skin colours vary. You are concerned about security and you have the above statistic in front of you. The sad fact of life is, most people will read the above and conclude that security-wise, a white person is a safer bet. They weren't. Or that is to say, the above statistic is of no use in telling you whether they are or not. Here's why.
Firstly, statistics is based largely on the fact that when the number of samples from the population is large, say ~100, then general population statistics are applicable. If the sample is, say, one or two, population statistics is of little to no use.
Secondly, and more importantly, your sample is no longer random. N.B. N.B. N.B. !!!!
I'll say that again, in case you missed it.
Your sample is no longer random.
The entire premise of statistics is that you randomly select individuals from the population. Statisticians stay up at night worrying themselves over how to do this, and are even more obsessive about their random number quality that a/dev/urandom geek. If your selection from the population is not random, then the statistics will be totally misleading.
You're at a job interview for a specific IT position, yet you want to use a population wide statistic for the entire population in this situation. You're basically assumming that all; qualified, black, geeks, applying for a job at your company, in your town, at this time, is a valid random selection from the entire black population of the United States. Congradulations. You just failed Data Analysis 101.
If you want to actually apply a statistic validly, again, you need to have a random sample, from the right population. In a job interview, you're never going to have a random sample. It may or may not be quasi random, but even it if was, you'd need a statistic for all contemporary, qualified, black, geeks, probably in your region. If you had that, then you might be justified in applying a statistic, but in reality, with such a small sample size (likely just one guy), the noise would be so high you're just wsting your time.
Instead of trolling for pretty useless statistics and data, companies should just hire based on merit. Take candidates, look them up and down, decide if they personally are the best person for the job. "Normal" is a statistic. Human beings are not homogeneous, they are all different, they all have strengths and weaknesses. If you base your hiring practicies on the averages, then you'll end up with average employees. Mediocre, jacks of all trades who are neither excellent or terrible at anything. And your company too will be as average as they come.
Physical appearance, manners, diction, etc... all matter. It's all about attention to detail. Most important though, is projecting the right balance of confidence / humility. These are people skills anybody can nail.
Basically, it's a popularity contest, and real quality comes second to superficial appearances. Frankly, I wouldn't want to work at a company who hired based largely on appearances. I mean, why don't we all just become rent boys instead? The hours would be shorter and at least your manager would have a clue about what it is you do.
Physical appearance, manners, diction, etc..., are all important qualities to people who are insecure in their own abilities. They can do physical appearance, manners, diction, etc..., a lot better than they can do say, programming, management, IT support, basically competantly running a company. Ergo, they'll put more stock in people with these qualities over competant people with actual skills.
At Google, people wear jeans. Know why? Because Google hires people for their real skills. For what they actually bring to the company. Not what some fashion conscious yuppie thinks is attention to detail. Professional attire. Sounds like a fashion show to me, and fashion shows do not make my company any money.
Tides of Time kicked Ecco 1's ass. I freely admit spending many memorable hours on my knees weeping like a child in front of of the screen while that wretched globe holding the last two of the Asterite's globes just floated there, mocking me. Great days.
But why should I pay money for a 12 year old game? I'll tell you why. It's because game companies are now incapable of producing games so good you'd spend days of your life crusing and screaming in frustration and still count the game as amoung the best you've ever played. They simply cannot do it anymore. So they have to chew on the cud of past successes. Liek a showband or a pop band "covering" a better band's tracks because they simply don't have the talent to make something on par.
Not that a game had to be frustrating. It just had to be enjoyable, even in its frustrating moments. Even in its low points. Game's nowadays spend more time and effort on ridiculous things like crafting out each characters digit, or otherwise trying to make games like movies.
Idiots. Super Mario World and Ecco the Dolphin are better than 99% of what's on gamestore shelves today. Period. You can push that up to 100% if you consider the new releases on some months. Gaming is dead. The mainstream killed it.
Some of the environments in the screenshots look fantastic too.
You call that looking good? It was uninspired, drab, bland. Man, gamers nowadays will call anythign with a high texture rate goodlooking. Get over it. Art design trumps resolution 99 times out of 100.
More and more advertisments on slashdot are essentially flash movies. More often than not, these either somehow break the DOM, causing themselves to appear over normal text. Perhaps this is what the GP was referring to.
Personally, I think this is deliberate on the part of the advertisers. It happens quasi randomly, and I would suspect foul play on their part. It's essentially Slashdot's fault for having allowed flash advertisements in the first place. Such a scenario was alway on the cards the moment you allow the walking disaster that is flash onto your webpages.
One unscrupulous advertisers could be the ruin of this site, with thousands of veteran commenters leaving in disgust if an all out popup spam or malware campaign is begun by only a single advertiser. I'm surprised 'Taco hasn't realised this and implemented more stringent rules for onsite advertisements.
I knew something smelt rotten the moment the first windows dialog box flashed on as I was entering my pin. Looking into it I found that a lot of ATMs nowadays run on Windows, some ATM software supplied by Diebold. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out that the ATM network is about as secure as Joe Six Pack's passwordless WLAN, XP SP1 ridden, all users admins, very own home network.
This announcement effectively says "The rule of law does not apply to the king's friends, and its protections do not extend to the king's friends' enemies".
Never forget the Golden Rule: "He who has the gold, makes the rules.".
But is it? Look at the battery problem mentioned in the article. Now we look and say duh, of course it makes sense to wrap batteries in a metal cylinder. But until that point no one had thought of doing it. The solution stared at them in the face, but no one ever sat down to think it through.
So one guy has a brain fart and now he can sit on his ass and impede human civilisation because of it? What ever happened to trade secrets? Copyright?
Patents are not about encouraging "innovative" ideas. They are not about rewarding research. They are about granting monopolies to people who grease enough palms. That was their original purpose, and that, beneath all the layers of bullshit, is still their purpose now. To grant monopoly; unrestricted, pure and total.
If you believe otherwise, then the marketo-psychic dominator troop have earned their pay today.
I've seen pictures in medical texts that could be considered child pornography just because they showed full frontal nudity of subjects at different ages to compare physical development as humans age.
What about pictures like this? Personally, I feel it's only a matter of time before the pedophile hysteria gets that picture banned.
People are getting reluctant to take pictures of their children in the bathtub nowadays, for fear of either being called a pedophile or having the pictures "get out" onto the internet. Most of our grandparents didn't get a set of clothes until they turned three or four. Today letting your toddler run naked around the house would be marked as "suspect" behaviour.
The child pornography hysertia is just that. Hysteria. Fueled mostly by right wingers unhappy with the freedoms of our society and by wide eyed neurotics who listen to them. Its a modern day witch hunt. The objective isn't to stop the pedophiles, it's to see them hang. The crowd wants blood, not justice.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. People who join groups or tribes that require conformity and obedience don't want to be individuals anymore. They still are, but they choose to surpress their individuality in favour of either conforming or getting others to conform to be like them.
In either case, it is no longer valid to speaking of being sterotypical when referring to the people in these groups as by definition, everyone in the group must conform to the sterotype. You don't have to paint all these people with the same brush. They did that themselves.
Correction.
11 people are going to be pissed as shit.
34 people are going to panic.
72 people are going to wonder if the story is relevant to them.
284 people aren't going to realise the story is relevant to them.
799599 people affected aren't even going to hear about this, let alone care.
There is a silent majority. It's silent because its too apathetic to speak.
Marketroids are duplicitous, unscuplulous, charlatans. In a related story, if you thought the campaign wasn't funded by Sony, you are a burden on your society and should be terminated for the good of all. News at 11.
This is an obvious fallacy based on what I like to call "The Tyranny of the Random Mean". Like most statistics, the GPs statement is valid, when based on a certain "population". In this case, the entire population of black people, in I presume the USA. And certainly it would be true that, on average, on average, if you selected at random 100 black people from the entire black population in the US, and the same for 100 white people, then the total sum of criminal convictions would probably be higher for the former group. Please note the italised and emboldened words in the above. They are very, very important.
Now, you're conducting a job interview, where the interviewees' skin colours vary. You are concerned about security and you have the above statistic in front of you. The sad fact of life is, most people will read the above and conclude that security-wise, a white person is a safer bet. They weren't. Or that is to say, the above statistic is of no use in telling you whether they are or not. Here's why.
Firstly, statistics is based largely on the fact that when the number of samples from the population is large, say ~100, then general population statistics are applicable. If the sample is, say, one or two, population statistics is of little to no use.
Secondly, and more importantly, your sample is no longer random. N.B. N.B. N.B. !!!!
I'll say that again, in case you missed it.
Your sample is no longer random .
The entire premise of statistics is that you randomly select individuals from the population. Statisticians stay up at night worrying themselves over how to do this, and are even more obsessive about their random number quality that a
You're at a job interview for a specific IT position, yet you want to use a population wide statistic for the entire population in this situation. You're basically assumming that all; qualified, black, geeks, applying for a job at your company, in your town, at this time, is a valid random selection from the entire black population of the United States. Congradulations. You just failed Data Analysis 101.
If you want to actually apply a statistic validly, again, you need to have a random sample, from the right population. In a job interview, you're never going to have a random sample. It may or may not be quasi random, but even it if was, you'd need a statistic for all contemporary, qualified, black, geeks, probably in your region. If you had that, then you might be justified in applying a statistic, but in reality, with such a small sample size (likely just one guy), the noise would be so high you're just wsting your time.
Instead of trolling for pretty useless statistics and data, companies should just hire based on merit. Take candidates, look them up and down, decide if they personally are the best person for the job. "Normal" is a statistic. Human beings are not homogeneous, they are all different, they all have strengths and weaknesses. If you base your hiring practicies on the averages, then you'll end up with average employees. Mediocre, jacks of all trades who are neither excellent or terrible at anything. And your company too will be as average as they come.
Physical appearance, manners, diction, etc..., are all important qualities to people who are insecure in their own abilities. They can do physical appearance, manners, diction, etc..., a lot better than they can do say, programming, management, IT support, basically competantly running a company. Ergo, they'll put more stock in people with these qualities over competant people with actual skills.
At Google, people wear jeans. Know why? Because Google hires people for their real skills. For what they actually bring to the company. Not what some fashion conscious yuppie thinks is attention to detail. Professional attire. Sounds like a fashion show to me, and fashion shows do not make my company any money.
Clearly, the girl was on fire.
Tides of Time kicked Ecco 1's ass. I freely admit spending many memorable hours on my knees weeping like a child in front of of the screen while that wretched globe holding the last two of the Asterite's globes just floated there, mocking me. Great days.
But why should I pay money for a 12 year old game? I'll tell you why. It's because game companies are now incapable of producing games so good you'd spend days of your life crusing and screaming in frustration and still count the game as amoung the best you've ever played. They simply cannot do it anymore. So they have to chew on the cud of past successes. Liek a showband or a pop band "covering" a better band's tracks because they simply don't have the talent to make something on par.
Not that a game had to be frustrating. It just had to be enjoyable, even in its frustrating moments. Even in its low points. Game's nowadays spend more time and effort on ridiculous things like crafting out each characters digit, or otherwise trying to make games like movies.
Idiots. Super Mario World and Ecco the Dolphin are better than 99% of what's on gamestore shelves today. Period. You can push that up to 100% if you consider the new releases on some months. Gaming is dead. The mainstream killed it.
You call that looking good? It was uninspired, drab, bland. Man, gamers nowadays will call anythign with a high texture rate goodlooking. Get over it. Art design trumps resolution 99 times out of 100.
More and more advertisments on slashdot are essentially flash movies. More often than not, these either somehow break the DOM, causing themselves to appear over normal text. Perhaps this is what the GP was referring to.
Personally, I think this is deliberate on the part of the advertisers. It happens quasi randomly, and I would suspect foul play on their part. It's essentially Slashdot's fault for having allowed flash advertisements in the first place. Such a scenario was alway on the cards the moment you allow the walking disaster that is flash onto your webpages.
One unscrupulous advertisers could be the ruin of this site, with thousands of veteran commenters leaving in disgust if an all out popup spam or malware campaign is begun by only a single advertiser. I'm surprised 'Taco hasn't realised this and implemented more stringent rules for onsite advertisements.
I knew something smelt rotten the moment the first windows dialog box flashed on as I was entering my pin. Looking into it I found that a lot of ATMs nowadays run on Windows, some ATM software supplied by Diebold. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out that the ATM network is about as secure as Joe Six Pack's passwordless WLAN, XP SP1 ridden, all users admins, very own home network.
Patents are not about encouraging "innovative" ideas. They are not about rewarding research. They are about granting monopolies to people who grease enough palms. That was their original purpose, and that, beneath all the layers of bullshit, is still their purpose now. To grant monopoly; unrestricted, pure and total.
If you believe otherwise, then the marketo-psychic dominator troop have earned their pay today.
Not if he files with the USPTO!
People are getting reluctant to take pictures of their children in the bathtub nowadays, for fear of either being called a pedophile or having the pictures "get out" onto the internet. Most of our grandparents didn't get a set of clothes until they turned three or four. Today letting your toddler run naked around the house would be marked as "suspect" behaviour.
The child pornography hysertia is just that. Hysteria. Fueled mostly by right wingers unhappy with the freedoms of our society and by wide eyed neurotics who listen to them. Its a modern day witch hunt. The objective isn't to stop the pedophiles, it's to see them hang. The crowd wants blood, not justice.